Roberval a year late, and carrying but a few worthless quartz diamonds and
a little sham gold. Then Roberval, the Lord of Norembega, reigns alone in
his vast and many-titled domain, for another season of snows and famine,
freely using the lash and gibbet to keep his penal colonists in
subjection; and then, according to some authorities, supported by the
absence of Carder's name from the local records of St. Malo for a few
months, Cartier was sent out to bring the Lord of Norembega home.

So Cartier's name passes from the pages of history, even if it still
appears again in the records of St. Malo, and he spends the rest of his
days on the rugged little peninsula thrust out from France toward the
west, as it were a hand. A few miles out of St. Malo the Breton tenants of
the Cartier manor, Port Cartier, to-day carry their cauliflower and
carrots to market and seemingly wonder at my curiosity in seeking
Cartier's birthplace rather than Chateaubriand's tomb. It were far fitter
that Cartier instead of Chateaubriand should have been buried out on the
"Plage" beyond the ramparts, exiled for a part of every day by the sea,
for the amphibious life of this master pilot, going in and out of the
harbor with the tide, had added to France a thousand miles of coast and
river, had opened the door of the new world, beyond the banks of the
Baccalaos, to the imaginations of Europe, and unwittingly showed the way
not to Asia, but to a valley with which Asia had nothing to compare.

For a half century after Cartier's home bringing of Roberval--the very
year that De Soto's men quitted in misery the lower valley of the
Mississippi--there is no record of a sail upon the river St. Lawrence.
Hochelaga became a waste, its tenants annihilated or scattered, and
Cartier's fort was all but obliterated. The ambitious symbols of empire
were alternately buried in snows and blistered by heat. France had too
much to think of at home. But still, as Parkman says, "the wandering